[ESPResSo-devel] Changing to GPLv3

[Olaf Lenz]

Hello everybody!

*Please read at least the next paragraph*
For many of you licensing stuff might be boring. Unfortunately, for
legal reasons, it is a pretty important nuisance.
Therefore: if you have ever contributed to ESPResSo, but if you do not
want to care about these things and trust us (i.e. the ESPResSo
maintainers) to do the right thing, then please reply to this email
shortly and indicate that you agree with what we are planning. It is
pretty important for us to have an explicit agreement of you.

Now for the details.

As most of you might have already heard, the maintenance of ESPResSo is
going to be relocated from Torsten Stühn (Max-Planck-Institute for
Polymer Research in Mainz) to me (Institute for Computational Physics in
Stuttgart). A future mailing will give more details on the consequences
of this (website, mailing lists, bugtracker etc.). The main change is
that the source code will be moved from the CVS server in Mainz to the
open source code hosting site at

        http://savannah.nongnu.org/

As a side effect of this move, it is necessary to clean up some issues
in the current licensing of ESPResSo, as was discussed when I tried to
register ESPResSo as a new project there. You can read about the details
here

        http://savannah.gnu.org/task/?10626

On the developer's meeting that we held in Stuttgart yesterday, we
decided that we will make ESPResSo in general much more GNUish. As for
the licensing this implies two modifications:

1. The first of these things is to remove the current file LICENSE.TXT
that contains a number of additional clauses to the GPL (which is in
file GPL.TXT) and that was called the "ESPResSo License". According to
the discussion above, this license is actually identical to the pure
GPL, as none of the clauses in the file do actually modify the license,
but can be seen as recommendations or just restate some of the GPL's
license terms. This means that removing this file does *not* mean that
we change the license! The recommendations will be moved to the README
file and the User's Guide. The only license will be the GPL.
Although this means that we would not need an agreement by the
developers, I would be happy if you all agree.

2. The current license is the GNU General Public License Version 2 (that
was in GPL.TXT so far). The ESPResSo license did not state which version
of the GPL was used, so this means that it is possible to simply upgrade
the version without your consent. However, as GPLv2 and GPLv3 have a few
significant differences, we would very much prefer if you would agree to
the change.
You can read some things about GPLv3 on these pages:

  GPL FAQ:
        http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html
  Wikipedia article:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Version_3
  Richard Stallman's "Why Upgrade to GPLv3"
        http://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html

So the question is: do you agree to change the license of ESPResSo to GPLv3?

Best regards
  Olaf

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